Wow! What a year!
For me, my family, and this business, 2016 was quite the year to remember. Let’s dig into the year in reverse topic order.
Petersen Media Group in 2016
Back in May I wrote about how I almost destroyed the business with a series of decisions and some health issues in 2015. The TL;DR version is that I neglected my self-promotion, growth, and family in 2015 with a partnership that, executed better, would have accomplished each of those much better.
Pretty early in the year, I started a video course for here, which I need to get cracking on the final 2/3 of. Man, the rest of the year really did fly by.
In July I got a series of projects that got the snowball rolling for the rest of the year with new relationships and skills. Right now, I have more ideas and projects to get moving on than I can shake a stick at, so I’m mentoring a padawan learner to work closely with me this summer to tackle a good portion of the coding and getting him real-world experience to decide what to do with the start of his career.
In the final closing moments of WordCamp Tampa 2016, I launched my first premium product into the WordPress space at my GenesisThe.me shop. I worked feverishly all weekend to squash bugs in my Genesis framework starter child theme for developers, which I cleverly named GenesisThe.me Developer Starter. See? I told you it was creative. That weekend, I also began work on a plugin for the shop and planned on launching a second theme in December, which is starting to look a lot like January now.
Family in 2016
Just a few days into the year, we were supposed to be saying goodbye to our newborn foster baby. Then a series of events happened that sat me on the couch late at night creating a “Surprise Adoption” site to raise emergency funds to secure our status with the adoption agency as no longer foster parents but adoptive parents. 11 months later, we found ourselves in the courtroom being sworn in to affirm our second son as a forever Petersen. We’re forever grateful to the over 140 people who donated on the site… and the approximately 50-60% of them who were WordPress-related. This community rocks!
Over the summer, my wife became a US citizen after moving here as a toddler… and then she got to vote in her very first presidential election. Great timing!
Before the election, we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary and our sons’ 7th and 1st birthdays. It’s been pretty much non-stop planning and partying since September in our house. If you follow me on Instagram (it’s a private account), you have seen the pics.
Personal
So the end of 2015 ended with me in the ER’s Trauma Room 1 with my heart racing out of control and a few days in the hospital while they sorted things out. The day we were getting adoption papers on our phones was the morning we were sitting in pre-op for a heart catheterization to permanently solve my racing heart issue. Yeah, that’s how we started out the year.
Over the course of the year being a dad of two boys and husband to a wife taking care of two boys while I tried to spend as much time at my desk as possible, I learned a few things about myself, which will be detailed in the following post with my 2017 goals.
On a final note that you won’t find in many year-end posts, with the help of some family seeing there was an issue (though they didn’t know what it was – more like, “figure it out”), I stopped taking prescription opiates for my headaches cold turkey two days after Thanksgiving. Something had been “off” with my personality for a year, which is how long we’d had big changes (see above), but also when I switched from short-acting to long-acting pain meds. So I quit them.
Stay tuned for more
That’s it for last year. Next up: 2017 goals
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